


Terrible Sting, Terrible Storm

by Etoiles_Filantes



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Character Study, Coming Out, Hurt/very little comfort, Jack Zimmermann's Overdose, Kent Parson is on fucking fire and will be alright one day, M/M, Minor Eric Bittle/Jack Zimmermann
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 17:25:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14753159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etoiles_Filantes/pseuds/Etoiles_Filantes
Summary: Sometimes he wondered if his touch had been any different from the sting of a wasp, and if Jack had finally realised he didn’t have to live with a nest in his bed.





	Terrible Sting, Terrible Storm

**Author's Note:**

> ['I can't explain the state that I'm in, the state of my heart, he was my best friend'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBMwwJMkcRA)
> 
> All characters, of course, belong to the ever wonderful and talented Ngozi.

Kent Parson loved Jack Zimmermann.

He loved him the first time they nailed what would soon become their patented no-look one-timer.

He loved him when they sat next to each other on the team bus, sharing headphones and pretending the way their shoulders and thighs touched was necessary.

He loved him at that late night practice when the air between them felt both electric suffocating as they moved in perfect sync in the game they both breathed. When Jack had suddenly dropped his gloves, all Kent could feel was relief (at least something was happening), but instead of Jack’s fist to his jaw, he’d felt his hands cup his face and then Jack’s lips on his. The kiss was dry and desperate and even with his limited experience, Kent could tell there was too much teeth, and he was so in love it fucking hurt.

He’d loved him every day since in secret looks and hidden touches, and every night fervently, as their bodies moved together in a rhythm they usually held to the ice.

He’d mapped out the entirety of Jack’s body, learned every scar and stretchmark and sounds emitted as his mouth slid over them, holier and more sacred than the hymns the nuns had taught him in school. He figured, later, years later, that if given the chance, he could find his way around again as if he’d never left.

(He was wrong. It was years later, and with a party raging on the floor beneath them (and oh, did that bring back memories) when Kent had finally gotten his hands and mouth on him again, that he started to realise the past was truly a country that could never be revisited. He’d pushed down the thought and continued to repeat the mistakes of that past.)

But Kent kept loving Jack – the sweet, gentle Jack that slowly lost his baby fat and turned into the mind blowingly handsome young man Kent had always seen.

He loved the Jack that stayed behind after games, but he hated how he beat himself up even when they’d won, over his non-existent mistakes, and who drowned his failures in alcohol and pills he tried to keep Kent from knowing about, but never quite succeeded. Kent wasn’t a fighter, not by a long shot, but he would have discarded his gloves and gone at anyone who spoke to Jack the way Jack thought of himself.

It was so painfully obvious, almost from day one, that Jack’s worst enemy was Jack. But Kent never quite managed to realise it, not until he found Jack lying on that bathroom floor in a house neither of them lived in, next to a dropped pill bottle in a colour so orange it looked poisonous (Kent had never been able to looks at pills – all pills – any other way since).

Kent had called an ambulance and called Jack’s parents and waited for someone – anyone – to arrive, with Jack’s head in his lap and his cold, limp hand clasped in his own. He hadn’t let go as Jack was finally loaded into the ambulance, or when the paramedics began their work. All he could focus on was Jack’s hand in his and the unsteady beeping of the machine connected to his heart. When it stopped, ten minutes from the hospital, he’d been forcefully shoved away and could only watch with tears he didn’t notice down his cheeks as the boy he loved was brought back to a life he didn’t seem to want.

He’d kept his hand to himself after that; he couldn’t feel Jack die again (it would have to mean his own death as well). But Jack survived and so did Kent (unfortunately, his brain supplied as he sat on a plane to join a team he’d never even fucking heard of before, in a seat that should’ve been Jack’s. The thought scared the shit out of him.)

 

 

Nevada was hot in that unforgiving way only desert cities could be (it only took a few years for Montréal to start feeling like a distant memory. Kent would find himself wondering, during yet another comfortable winter day, if his love-starved teenaged brain had made it all up, but always something would end up reminding him of Jack and it all became more real than he could bear).

But he got used to the weather and he got used to the city. Vegas was no hockey town and it showed: Kent could walk down the street or into a shop, or even one of the numerous gay bars on days he felt either brave or stupid enough, and no one would even look at him twice (except for the bars. He knew how to make men look at him twice). No one would wonder if that wasn’t the new forward on the hockey team most didn't know they had, until they did, as he scored goal after goal and made himself more prominent on the world map of hockey than he’d ever dared imagine he would ever become ~~on his own~~.

Winning the Cup was everything Kent had dreamt it’d be. He only wished that he was able to relish in the feeling fully, without thinking that it really wouldn't feel real until he had Jack by his side. The feeling returned at the next win, and the one after that and he hated himself for it.

He was advancing in the world they were supposed to build together at a nearly unforeseen speed, all the while chasing after an immobile Jack (like a dog chasing its own tail until it collapsed in exhaustion, always convinced it’d catch it if it just kept trying and unaware of the pain sinking its teeth in would bring) because he knew he would come back to him. They’d play together again one day, and it would all be like before – like it was supposed to be.

But when it came down to it, he hadn’t even bothered to hold out for Jack. Looking back, perhaps he’d already then known that there was nothing to hold out for (that he was nothing worth coming back to), even if he'd refused to think that at the time.

(He’d been a little wary at first. He’d read about others (in forums, on blogs, in comments) for whom it took years before they could allow another person to touch them after a loss (and he really had known all along, hadn’t he), but Kent never felt that. The first man he had since Jack (older, experienced, soft hands and rough kisses) was nothing like Jack, but the orgasm had felt just as good and the aftermath just as impersonal.)

By the time he placed a second Cup ring on his finger (and that didn’t take long now, did it, ’cause he was Kent fucking Parson and he was on fucking fire) he could barely make it to a stop'n'shop without someone or other he would never see again asking for his name on a piece of paper and his face on their phone. He complied, of course, but the smile on his face was always a mask and the words in his mouth rang hollow.

Gay bars became out of the question before he’d even gotten used to them; following his own desires was a risk he simply couldn’t afford to take. He was on fucking fire, yes, but as with all flames, one instant of mishandling could very quickly dissolve into a forest fire that left nothing but ashes and scorched memories in its wake.

So he kept to himself and he kept up the play. He smiled at fans and he joked with vultures disguised as journalists and he flirted with women (and made sure to be seen doing so. The vultures did the rest of the work). He learned to keep a straight face when Jack was brought up, to drole off the words drilled into him by the Aces’ PR and make it sound real. To not punch anyone that as much as mentioned ’Jack Zimmermann’ and ’drugs’ in the same sentence (Carl being an exception he made himself promise he wouldn’t repeat).

Eventually the vultures stopped circling the fossil of his and Jack’s shared past, and his teammates figured out that Jack Zimmermann was a name that should not be mentioned when he was around. He became straight in the eyes of the world. He played his part and he played it well.

(Or so he told himself. It turned out Swoops had known, about the gay thing and the Jack thing both, ever since Kent had gotten black-out drunk one night after a Cup win and spilled it all in a small back room of their rink, with no one around but the two of them and a shit-ton of empty bottles. Swoops never mentioned it - not until Kent came out to him in the locker room a few years later without a drop of alcohol in his body. He liked to think of himself as a good friend of Parser’s that way. Up until then, Kent hadn’t thought he had any friends other than a diva of a Maine Coon with an awesome name, that he’d gotten himself when they threw the C at him before he could even legally buy a drink and felt more lonely than he thought possible. He supposed there were a lot of things he didn’t know after all.)

 

 

Kent Parson loved Jack Zimmermann and Jack Zimmermann loved a blond kid in a Falconer’s jersey whose arms were around his neck and whose mouth was on his for the whole world to see and Kent wanted to throw up. To scream. To cry his gay fucking heart out. But his teammates’ words were in his ears as they crowded around him and Kent stayed still – he couldn’t afford to do anything else; Jack was out, and if Kent wasn’t careful, he was going to be, too. So he stayed still and watched the love of his life kiss what had to be the love of _his_ life (why else would he do something so fucking stupid?) on a tiny screen in a crowded bar again and again and again and again and each time feeling another little knife twist the sad remains of his heart apart.

(He’d read a book, around the time he started loving Jack, about a man and a boy falling deeply in love over the course of a summer, only for the boy to have his heart irreparably broken in the end by the man marrying another and forgetting everything they'd had. And no matter how sweet his and Jack’s time together had been, it was really only fair, after everything he’d done, that he’d be left crying by a fireplace as well.)

Jack had moved on, Kent realised, as he watched the video on Scrappy's phone and later, when Jack and his boy-that-wasn’t-Kent finally came back from their hiding, an interview ("I'm not gay, I'm bisexual), that he didn't know him at all. He’d loved Jack so much and for so long, and yet it had never even crossed his mind that he could be something other than gay. He'd been projecting his own homosexuality onto him, and he'd probably never know how much else, because when it really came down to it, they’d never actually talked about anything at all.

He didn’t know a single fucking thing about Jack, and of all the things that tore him apart as he watched that little video on Scrappy’s phone over and over in that dimly-lit bar and the interview on his giant screen in his giant apartment, that was probably the worst of them all.

Perhaps they’d been star-crossed lovers in the wrong universe, or soulmates in a world where there was no such thing, or a crappy, modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet (now with hockey!).

Or perhaps they’d been nothing more than the result of putting two hormonal, queer boys together in a hyper-masculine, highly competitive and homophobic environment with little to no adult supervision.

Whatever they’d been, the fact remained: Kent Parson loved Jack Zimmermann, but Jack Zimmermann didn’t love Kent Parson, nor would he ever. Perhaps he had once, somewhere underneath all the pills and the alcohol and the anxiety, or perhaps he hadn’t. Kent would never know.

Some day, he figured, he’d learn how not to care as well.

**Author's Note:**

> (It's been a long time since I read Call Me By Your Name, so if I remember wrong, please just pretend there was a fireplace in the book as well as in the movie.)
> 
> My (admittedly horribly-themed) [tumblr](https://nevercaughtbyghosts.tumblr.com).


End file.
